


The Marauders' Wagers

by JanuaryGrey (Jan3693)



Series: The Rise and Fall of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bets & Wagers, F/M, Friendship, Humor, M/M, MWPP, Marauders' Era, Quidditch, angsty ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 04:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10869537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jan3693/pseuds/JanuaryGrey
Summary: Each of the Marauders supports a different team in the British and Irish Quidditch League, which leads to a series of increasingly ridiculous wagers on matches over the course of their years at Hogwarts.





	The Marauders' Wagers

**Author's Note:**

> My very first fic!

In most matters, the Marauders followed James Potter’s lead. That was simply how things worked out. James had a natural sort of charisma to him that made even his stupidest ideas sound not only achievable but downright clever…right up to the moment they were all standing in front of an outraged professor getting detention. Thus, it was to James’s great frustration that the one thing he could never convince his friends to do was support a single Quidditch team.

They all readily acknowledged that James was the expert on the sport within their group. From plays to players, stats and scores, James clearly knew the most and cared the most. They deferred to him in all Quidditch related matters...except when it came to Quidditch League teams.

James had chosen his favorite team at a young age, but it had not been an impulsive decision. He had weighed the strengths and histories of every team in the League, learning most of his basic maths through match scores and points averages. Through carefully childish analysis he’d decided that Puddlemere United was the best team in the British and Irish Quidditch League. Ever since he had been staunchly loyal to the golden bulrushes.

Remus had little interest in the finer points of the sport and zero interest in playing Quidditch himself, but he was a steadfast supporter of the Caerphilly Catapults. His allegiance had been learned at his father's knee, listening to Lyall Lupin cheer and curse at the wireless whenever the Catapults played. His father’s enthusiasm, supplemented by a healthy dose of Welsh pride courtesy of his mother, had cemented Remus’s team loyalty long before he ever stepped foot in Hogwarts. It was something he refused to give it up, not even for his new friends.

Sirius, despite being James’s match in all other ways, was inexplicably devoted to the Holyhead Harpies. “You know they only ever hire witches,” James told him. 

“So? I don't want to play for the team,” Sirius said with a roll of his eyes. Unlike James, he and the others weren't aspiring to play professional Quidditch after school. “I just want them to beat the pants off everyone else in the League.”

“Maybe it's _because_ they're all girls,” Peter suggested with a snicker. Sirius had just given him another eye roll and refused to be moved on the matter.

Even Peter, who idolized James in everything else, had been born and raised in Wimbourne and would not forsake his hometown team. In fact, it was Peter's loyalty to the Wimbourne Wasps that led to their very first wager. 

It was nearing the end of the British and Irish League season, and the end of the Marauders’ first year, and the League Cup was down to Puddlemere versus Wimbourne.

“There's no way the Wasps'll win it,” James pronounced the morning of the match. In defiance of the dress code, both he and Peter were sporting badges supporting their teams. 

“Will too!” Peter protested around a mouth full of toast. He swallowed and added. “Iseult Watson is the best Seeker in the League!”

“Won't matter when your Keeper never remembers to guard his left goal,” said James.

Peter was unused to arguing with James. It made him nervous, but he raised his chin stubbornly. “We'll win!” He snapped. “And when we do, you'll have to eat your words and…and wear my Wasps badge all next week!” 

Remus and Sirius—whose teams had finished the season a rather embarrassing eleventh and a decent fifth, respectively—both laughed at the look of shock and disgust on James's face. 

“Too right, Pete!” Sirius piped up. “Take the bet, Potter!”

“It only seems fair,” Remus added. “Besides, if you _really_ believe Puddlemere will win it won't matter.”

They were both more than eager to see James put in his place after he'd crowed loudly for days when his team had beat both the Harpies and the Catapults earlier in the year.

“All right,” James agreed. “But _when_ my team wins you have to wear my Puddlemere scarf for a week, Pete.” He stuck his hand out across the table toward Peter. The smaller boy looked at it uncertainly for a moment, then wiped a bit of jam off his fingers and shook on it.

“Quite the gentleman's wager,” Remus remarked with a smile.

*

Wimbourne's keeper did let quite a few goals in through the left post—just as James had predicted. However, Peter's praise for the Wasps' seeker turned out to be equally well-founded. According to the report in the _Daily Prophet_ , she executed a breathtaking swoop to catch the Snitch right out from beneath the broom tail of Puddlemere's team captain, giving the match to Wimbourne 470 to 440.

James sulked as he wore Peter’s bright yellow and black badge, but, true to his word, he kept it on for an entire week.

*

Next year, the Quidditch season started off with a match between the Holyhead Harpies and last year’s League Champions, the Wimbourne Wasps. James eyed Sirius and Peter appraisingly over the sports page of the _Daily Prophet_. 

“So, Pete, what do you think the chances are of a repeat of last year?” James asked.

“What do you mean?” Peter asked. 

James turned the newspaper so Peter and Sirius could both see the headline, which read **WILL WASPS WOBBLE WITHOUT WATSON?** Peter looked almost embarrassed on behalf of his team, who had lost their prized Seeker to a lucrative position on an international exhibition team over the summer.

“It’s rubbish, of course,” James said. He tossed the paper down on the table, nearly knocking over Remus’s pumpkin juice. 

“It…it is?” Peter asked. He squinted suspiciously across the table at James, like he expected to find himself on the butt end of a joke at any second.

“Of course it is,” James said brightly. “I’ve been keeping up with the training reports all summer, and even without Watson, the Wasps have a strong lineup this season.” He began ticking off points on his fingers. “They’ve got a much better Keeper this year, not to mention some excellent Chasers, and the Seeker they brought up from the reserve team—Beasley—is really stepping up his game. Now, I don’t think they’ll be able to take Puddlemere in the end, of course, but it’ll probably come down to the two of us again for the Cup.”

Just down the table, Sirius had started to stab at a poached egg with unwarranted aggression, yellow yolk oozing sluggishly across his plate.

“I think you’re right!” Peter agreed happily. He was practically bouncing in his seat at James’s praise for his Quidditch team. “League Champions two years running!” 

“Never going to happen,” Sirius cut in. “Wimbourne is still chugging along those old Cleansweeps while the Harpies are all flying the new Nimbuses. Besides, your chasers have _nothing_ on Nithercott and Gadhavi.” He sounded haughty and bored. Sirius was good at that. He could wrap himself in Black family breeding and superiority as easily as he could shrug on a cloak. Most of the time, he did it without even thinking and flushed with embarrassment and frustration when his friends called him on it. Sometimes though, he did it on purpose knowing he could wound with it.

Peter flinched, and Sirius smirked down at his brutalized egg. He didn’t see that James was smirking too. James knew his friends well. Remus and Peter would have backed down or side-stepped away from such blatant goading, but Sirius’s pride was far too prickly to let it go.

“So…” James slowly dragged out the word. “You wouldn’t be afraid to bet on it then, would you, Sirius?”

“What? Like you and Peter did last year?” Sirius huffed. He was trying to keep the cold, condescension in his voice, but a hint of hot irritation was leaking through. James sensed fear. “No. It was a stupid wager last year, and it’s still stupid now.”

“That’s all right,” Peter said hesitantly. “I don’t really—”

James cut him off though. He was grinning broadly now, a spark of inspiration catching in his brain. “What if we make it a little more interesting then?”

Sirius finally looked up from his breakfast, entrapped by both his pride and his curiosity. “What did you have in mind?”

Peter could only listen in horror as James and Sirius argued out the stakes of the wager _he_ was ostensibly making with Sirius.

*

James turned out to be right about the Wasps' chances though, and for two days Sirius walked the halls of Hogwarts with bright yellow stripes charmed into his black hair. 

From then on, there was no backing down for any of them.

Remus wore his robes backwards for three days after the Harpies recouped from their earlier loss to beat the Catapults. On James’s victory in their wager, Sirius had to write an entire potions essay in bright pink ink that smelled like Peter’s grandmother, according to Peter. Slughorn gave him a very strange look and sniffed at the parchment when Sirius turned it in.

After that, both James and Puddlemere United had their vengeance for last year’s Cup Final defeat, and Peter had to spend a dinner at the Hufflepuff table. It rather backfired on James though when a giggling, apple-cheeked third year gave Peter a quick kiss before Professor Sprout chased him back to his proper table.

In a particular act of cruelty, Remus forced James to flatten his hair with generous amounts of Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion, much as the Catapults had flattened Puddlemere United in February. Sirius compounded the humiliation by sneaking a photo and sending it to James’s parents. 

None of their teams made it as far as the final, but Remus and Peter finished them out for the season at fifth and sixth, with the Catapults narrowly snatching victory along with the Snitch. Peter paid for the loss by letting Remus jinx his ears to three times their normal size.

By then, as James declared proudly, they were no longer making gentlemen’s wagers, they were making Marauders’ Wagers.

*

Things escalated in third year. 

Sirius earned a week’s worth of detention after the Harpies’ narrow loss to Puddlemere United had him running from Gryffindor Tower to the third floor and back in nothing but his underpants. He claimed that Professor McGonagall let him off easy because she was impressed by what she saw. No one believed him for a moment.

James nearly put an end to the entire thing halfway through the year when Peter declared that, should the Wasps beat Puddlemere, James had to write a love poem to Severus Snape and read it in public. Thankfully, Puddlemere was in top form, and Peter wound up with a lime green mustache charmed onto his face for a week instead.

The Caerphilly Catapults had a spectacular season, and each of the other three Marauders' teams fell before Remus that year. Sirius earned more detention when he spent an entire Transfiguration class answering all of McGonagall’s questions by meowing. Peter nearly lost a tooth after having to stuff his mouth with eight exploding bonbons at once.

However, Remus lived to regret his wager with James. His demand that James loudly and publicly ask Lily Evans to be his Valentine seemed to please James far more than it embarrassed him. 

*

Fourth year there were no wagers, not that the rest of the school knew that. The Marauders’ rather public history of betting on Quidditch made it much more believable when there were side effects to the long, complicated process of becoming animagi. When Peter grew whiskers, they told anyone who asked that it was because the Wasps had lost to the Harpies. No one questioned it, even though the match had happened almost a month earlier.

The month they spent holding mandrake leaves in their mouths was passed off by Remus—the only one who could still speak clearly—as a vow of silence he’d imposed on his friends after Wimbourne and Holyhead had both lost to Caerphilly. James’s silence, he said, was for an alternative wager since Puddlemere beat the Catapults with a genuinely impressive last minute goal just seconds before Catapult’s Seeker caught the Snitch.

James did insist through an emphatically written note that Remus suffer for that loss. Watching what his friends were going through for his sake, Remus could hardly refuse. That was how he wound up standing on top of the long Gryffindor dining table, using an amplifying charm to serenade the entire Great Hall with Puddlemere United’s anthem “Beat Back Those Bludgers, Boys, and Chuck That Quaffle Here.”

Dumbledore had applauded and actually gave Gryffindor five points “for excellent pitch,” which McGonagall promptly took away for causing a disturbance during dinner.

*

Fifth year’s season started with a goblet thrust under Peter’s nose.

“Ugh! What is that?” Peter gagged and pulled sharply away from the cup full of foul-smelling brown liquid.

“The bitter taste of defeat, Pete. Drink up,” James said, shoving the goblet toward Peter again.

“Do I really have to?” Peter whined. 

“Yes,” Remus and Sirius chorused together. They were as in the dark as Peter about what was in the goblet, but they were eager to see what effects it would have.

Peter held his nose and grimaced but downed the mysterious concoction in a single gulp. He gagged and sputtered, but kept it down. For several long minutes, they all sat in anticipation. Nothing happened. 

“Well,” James huffed. “That was disappoin—”

He was halfway through the word when Peter leaned forward and vomited on James's shoes, only it wasn’t the remains of his lunch that came out. Instead, Peter began puking forth great tangles of long blonde hair.

“James! What did you give him?” Remus asked as they all jumped away from Peter, who was still retching hair the same pale color as that on his head, only much longer.

“Just some of that hair-growth potion you made for extra-credit in Potions, Moony, I swear!” James protested. 

“Merlin’s Pants, Prongs!” Sirius swore. “You gave him a potion _Remus_ made? Are you trying to poison Peter?” 

“Hey—” Remus’s protestations were cut off as Peter started gagging.

“Hospital Wing, Wormtail!” Sirius said, steering Peter out of the room while trying to avoid stepping in new splatters of wet hair. “Quickly now!”

After that, the four of them agreed to ban all potions brewed by Remus Lupin from any of their future wagers.

*

Compared to the hair incident, the rest of their fifth year wagers went off smoothly.

James publicly suffered for a loss to the Caerphilly Catapults by snogging a bust of Cliodna in the middle of a busy hallway. His embarrassment was compounded when the bust shrugged its half-sculpted shoulders after he’d finished and said, “Eh, I’ve had better.” 

In contrast, Sirius seemed oddly unperturbed by James’s demand that he ask Bartleby Ibbott, a sixth year Ravenclaw, to accompany him to Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop on their next Hogsmeade trip. Ibbott declined with a laugh, but it led to a long conversation after James caught Sirius snogging Ibbott in a hidden passageway two weeks later.

Remus even managed to deliver half a dozen love letters “from a secret admirer” to Professor Sinistra without ever being caught. When she started giving Flitwick funny looks at meals, Remus admitted to the other Marauders that he had imitated the Charms Professor’s handwriting, and had apparently done a good job at it. 

James gave his friend a discerning look when Sinistra blushed and giggled at something tiny Professor Flitwick said. “Say, Moony, would you—”

“No, James.”

“But you don’t even know what I was going to say!” James protested.

“So, you weren’t going to ask me to write you a letter to give to Lily Evans?”

“Well…”

“No, James.”

*

Sixth year the entire school witnessed quite a sight after the Harpies eviscerated Puddlemere United. Sirius borrowed Muggle cosmetics from Mary McDonald, and James had to lead Gryffindor’s own Quidditch team against Ravenclaw wearing sparkly gold eyeshadow, bright pink lipstick, and far too much blush. Unlike Puddlemere, Gryffindor persevered. 

Superstitiously, James wore gold eyeshadow for every other match that year. He felt it was entirely justified after Gryffindor took the Quidditch Cup that season, though he did hastily rub off the shadow before submitting to any pictures. He didn’t find out until next year that Peter had already taken several photographs.

*

Late that year—approximately three months after Remus and Sirius started dating—the Catapults crushed the Harpies. Sirius’s cheeks went a startling shade of scarlet when he read the scores in the _Daily Prophet_ at breakfast. Sitting across from him, Remus had a smug smile on his lips, but he was blushing just as brightly. 

“What did you two wager?” Peter asked. Usually, they all talked about it beforehand, but Remus and Sirius had been tightlipped about their bet this time.

Remus bit his lip and looked very pointedly away. 

“I’ll tell you if you _really_ want to know, Wormtail,” Sirius offered with a wink.

Finally catching on, Peter quite wisely declined. 

He and James never found out the exact nature of that wager, but they did find themselves locked out of their dorm for several hours that evening. After that, neither Remus nor Sirius ever looked too disappointed by a loss to the other. 

*

Their old arrangement became fraught with terror for James, Peter, and Remus during seventh year. Not only had the Holyhead Harpies recruited a particularly talented new seeker, but Lily insisted on joining their betting pool after she and James started dating. Lily, to no one’s surprise, was also a Harpies supporter, which caused a few arguments over whether or not two members of the group could support the same team. 

Ultimately, Lily and Sirius were both allowed to back the Harpies, but they had to work together and agree on one single wager rather than two separate ones. That, the others quickly came to realize, had been a monumentally bad decision on their part. Taken on their own, Lily and Sirius could already be ruthlessly creative. Together, they were monstrous.

James wasn’t sure he’d ever been more frightened in his life than when he watched malicious grins spread across the faces of his girlfriend and his best friend as they whispered together. Certainly, he had never prayed so hard for his team’s victory as when those smiles were turned on him for the League Final. 

*

There was never a winner or a loser of that wager though. Nor were there any wagers at all after that.

Two days before the match, the Harpies’ talented new Seeker—a Muggleborn witch named Georgiana Hobble—was murdered. Above the wreckage of her home, a skull and snake made of emerald stars lingered in the night sky. 

Rumors ran rampant, irrationally stoked and then refuted—often within the same issue—by the _Daily Prophet_. The Ministry cancelled British and Irish League Final in the wake of the murder and all the chaos that came with it. The news hit hard all across Hogwarts, but between the Marauders and Lily it was devastating. 

Lily cried. Not in the Great Hall where they all read the news, but later in the day, hidden in a secret alcove behind a tapestry. It was James who’d showed her the space weeks before, hoping for a snog. He was the one who found her there, now. They didn’t speak, just held each other close as James thought about the Muggleborn Seeker whose reddish hair and brash smile had reminded him of Lily. 

It all felt real after that. The war that had been brewing since they were children was suddenly exploding. They’d seen the signs, even been touched by the fear and anger, but it had still been easy to forget, especially behind the thick walls of Hogwarts, far removed from real violence and danger. 

Those walls wouldn’t shelter them for much longer though, and the stakes were suddenly much higher than anything they could have ever imagined.


End file.
